


Delin's Foundling

by Frostanity



Category: Books of the Raksura - Martha Wells
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-17
Updated: 2019-01-03
Packaged: 2019-08-24 20:13:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 18,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16646987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Frostanity/pseuds/Frostanity
Summary: Slight AU. What if Delin had found Moon before Stone did?





	1. Prologue

“Grey snatcher ahead!” 

The lookout’s warning interrupted Delin’s conversation with his daughter. They both glanced up at the sky. It was nearing nightfall, so it was normal for these flying predators to be out hunting, but they usually avoided wind ships. 

This one, however, was making a beeline towards them. 

“It’s chasing something,” Elen said, squinting. “Hard to see what it is, it’s all black.”

“It might be a person,” Delin said after a moment. An animal should be trying to take cover in nature, not heading straight for the only people-made object in sight. 

Neither flyer was changing direction, although the grey snatcher seemed to be gaining on the smaller flyer. By now, Delin could make out limbs and was certain he was right. That was a person seeking help. 

Elen’s swear indicated she had come to the same conclusion. “Predator incoming!” she yelled. They didn’t have much in the way of weapons aboard, but enough to repel overly bold predators. 

The person crash-landed on their wind ship behind a stack of secured crates. The snatcher passed right over deck, but did not attempt a landing in the face of half a dozen spears jabbing at it. Everybody pivoted to watch the snatcher, which hadn’t given up yet. It rose and circled above the boat, looking for its prey. It wasn’t the biggest predator in these parts, but it was still quite capable of snatching and carrying off a grown person, hence its name. Delin was a little torn between observing the snatcher—he’d never seen one up close—and checking on the would-be prey. 

Peering behind the crates, Delin said, “Hello? Are you well?” 

The flyer stared at Delin from where it huddled on the ground. It had large leathery wings, skin covered in back scales, and spiny things in lieu of hair. It was surprisingly small, and Delin had the appalling certainty that he was looking at someone too young to be out and about alone. It was also scared out of its mind, chest heaving and eyes wide and wild. The flyer darted a look up at the circling snatcher then went back to staring at Delin. 

“It won’t attack the ship,” Delin said in Atlanic. “You’re safe here. Are you injured?” He tried a few other languages, but received no more response. Pulling a large round fruit from his pocket, he held it out. “Here, are you hungry?” He couldn’t be sure this person could eat fruit, but right now it was all he had to offer.

The boy’s stare—Delin was willing to make a guess for maleness until he got more information—seemed to indicate interest, so Delin tossed the fruit gently. It was grabbed out of the air, sniffed, and devoured at once. 

“Elen,” Delin called. “Can we have food brought out? Anything that can be eaten right now.”

Small salted fish and fruit came up. Delin offered them one at a time and watched as they disappeared. Still the child would not speak, nor come any closer. Twilight was giving way to a cloudy night so they couldn’t even see whether the predator was still around, but it seemed unlikely this panicked child would accept to go inside. They brought blankets out instead and Delin settled against a crate.

“Father, are you sure?” Elen asked.

“It’s safe enough on deck,” Delin said. “We’ll be fine.”

Elen gave him a look that said she knew he’d deliberately misunderstood who exactly she was worried about. Still, she did not press the issue. “Yell if something tries to eat you.”

The wind was nowhere near warm at night, even with a thick blanket. At least the child had consented to wrap one around himself, although in a way that left his wings free. This level of wariness said unfortunate things about the child’s worldly experience. 

Delin kept up a light chatter about a myriad of subjects, eventually venturing to, “Might you be a Raksura? I’ve only seen one from afar but your scales seem similar.” The one he’d seen was reportedly as old as he was large, which was very, but he didn’t have any better guess. “You’re clearly not a Fell. Their scales are definitively different and you lack the bone crest. If you’re not a Raksura, perhaps you’re from a species I’ve never heard of? I’m always happy to meet new people.”

“Aren’t you afraid of me?” the child whispered. 

Delin tried not to react to the child’s sudden participation in the conversation. “As I said, you’re clearly not a Fell so I have no reason to be afraid. Is it Raksura, then?”

“I don’t know what a Raksura is.”

“Perhaps there’s more than one word for your kind. Raksura are shifters who live in forested areas. They live in great colonies led by queens. Some have wings and some don’t. Does that sound familiar?”

The child hunched over. “I don’t know.”

“Do you have family we can return you to? We can make a detour.”

“No.”

That rang a great many alarm bells in Delin’s mind. So young to be an orphan! But if he did have family he wouldn’t have been fleeing from a great predator with no one to help. 

“We’ll see what we can do in the morning,” Delin said. “After breakfast,” he added slyly. “Do you mind telling me your name? I’m Delin-Evran.”

“I’m Moon.”

“Good night, Moon. Come closer if you get too cold.”

Delin settled in to try and get what little rest he could. He hoped the child would not jump off-board during the night, but he couldn’t restrain him if that’s what he wanted to do. 

Halfway through the night, Delin came awake to find there was a child’s head resting on his leg. A head covered in messy hair. The wings and scales were gone. This Moon was a shifter after all. And he wasn’t asleep; he held himself in a way that betrayed a readiness to escape. Afraid, yet starved for touch. 

Delin moved slowly to pat Moon’s hair, humming a lullaby that always put his grandchild Diar right to sleep. He couldn’t tell which of them drifted off first, but it was no matter; he was sure Moon would still be there in the morning.


	2. Chapter 2

_Many years later…_

Niran got out of bed first, awkwardly climbing over Moon’s body. Moon had his own bed across the room but he liked sneaking into Niran’s whenever he felt lonely. He’d started doing it a long time ago because tiny Niran had been prone to nightmares, but while Niran had outgrown the bad dreams, Moon hadn’t outgrown the desire for a living pillow now and then. 

“Where you going,” Moon muttered.

“There’s a family meeting about resupplying the ship. Stay here, sleepyhead.”

Delin believed that Moon’s species, the mysterious and elusive Raksura, required more sleep than Golden Islanders, but Niran liked to poke at Moon for it anyway. That was okay because Moon liked to poke back about Niran’s puny arms. 

By the time Moon was ready and willing to be awake, nearly everybody had gone off on errands and he had to eat breakfast alone. This wasn’t unusual. He wandered over to Delin, who was sitting at his desk sipping a steaming hot drink and going over some new scholarly papers, and sat on the floor. 

“Anything interesting in there?” Moon inquired. He couldn’t read many languages, but Delin would summarize anything peculiarly interesting on request.

Delin patted Moon’s hair absently and Moon leaned into the affectionate gesture. It might have been a childish thing to enjoy, but he didn’t care.

“Not much of interest, I’m afraid,” Delin said after a moment. “Are you bored? You can go catch up with Niran and Diar. Their shopping list is long and they’ll need help hauling everything back.”

“I’ll go.” Moon rose and stretched. “I might go fishing after. I’m getting hungry.” Sure, he’d just had a normal groundling breakfast of grains and dry fish, but that was more a snack than a real meal. 

“As always, use caution,” Delin said. He was staring down at his papers in a way that seemed to put the lie to his assertion that there was nothing interesting in there. 

Moon didn’t voice his suspicion, because he knew very well that Delin was still trying to find more information on Raksura and he didn’t want to have an argument about it. Delin had repeatedly offered to fund an expedition towards the Reaches, where Raksura were said to dwell, but Moon had always refused. He had Delin and Niran and Diar and all their assorted relatives; what else did he need? Besides, if the other Raksura had wanted him, they wouldn’t have abandoned him and the others. 

Moon headed toward market on foot, scanning the sky from habit as if they were on another exploratory mission in some remote, predator-filled area. He had better eyesight than Golden Islanders so lookout was usually his main duty, that and driving off predators dumb enough to get close. He wasn’t likely to spot anything dangerous here, though. 

Huh. What was that, far away? A big spec, chasing down smaller ones? Shading his eyes against the sun’s glare, he looked again. The specs were growing bigger at a rate that implied great speed. He could already make out wings and bright colors and--were those arms and legs? Winged people pursued by something huge and snake-like. 

Moon stood there like an idiot for several long heartbeats, people jostling him as they walked by. Then a few people stopped and started pointing. By now even their dim eyesight could make out the scene. 

Jerking into motion, Moon leapt up to grab the nearest roof edge and hauled himself up. Some exclaimed below, but most locals had heard of “Delin’s foundling,” if not seen him fly about, so there was no panic as he shifted and took flight, his mind reeling. 

According to Delin’s research, Moon was a member of a species called Raksura, flying shape-shifters who usually had jewel colors to their scales. He himself had black scales, which apparently meant he was a rare breeding male. This had never meant anything to him before, but presently he felt awfully self-conscious about just flying up to these potential Raksura. Not that he had a choice; that giant serpent thing was clearly a menace. 

None of the winged strangers saw him approach because they had turned around to face their pursuer. The biggest stranger, a blue-scaled person who seemed to be female, closed with the creature, clawing at its head while the others darted in and out, trying to help. Moon circled for additional height, trying to decide how to attack without risking a collision. He quickly spotted a big, discolored lump on the creature’s back. A tumor, maybe? Whatever it was, it was probably sensitive and would cause pain if ripped into. He dove for it.

The lump split under impact with a wet tearing sound. To Moon’s horror, there seemed to be a person in there, black-scaled and prone. Relief followed when the person opened their eyes and jumped for his throat; that wasn’t another Raksura, that was a Fell ruler. He’d unfortunately seen Fell before, though never this close. This was going to be…interesting. 

Moon evaded the Fell’s lunge with a backward leap, ending in a crouch and with bared fangs. “Too slow,” he taunted. 

The ruler looked puzzled. “Who—”

Whatever it meant to say Moon would never find out, because the blue-scaled woman plowed into it from behind, killing and beheading it with worrying speed and strength. If that woman decided she didn’t like getting help from strangers, Moon himself might be in some trouble. 

But there was no anger in the stranger’s face, only shock and disbelief. “Who are you?” she said, speaking over the wind. They crouched face to face on the serpent’s back, holding on against the wind with their claws.

“I’m Moon,” he shouted back, wary but trying to be polite. “Who are you?”

“Just Moon?” She was starting to look suspicious now, which wasn’t encouraging. 

One of the other Raksura yelled, “Jade, get off!”

The serpent creature they stood on had turned right around and was fleeing at an amazing pace. It was so fast that the other Raksura were being left behind, unable to keep up. Moon pushed off, and so did the blue person named Jade. 

They both tumbled in the air, wings spread wide to regain stability. Moon opted to beat a hasty retreat. He didn’t know what kind of temper these people might have and he wasn’t in a mood to find out while outnumbered. 

Looking back, Moon saw he was being followed, but respectfully, at a distance. Nobody was trying to catch him. He slowed his pace in return, and decided to lead them to the docks. There would be plenty of eyes there to run to Delin and tell him his foundling was in surprising company. The market was close by, too, so Niran and Diar might be alerted by the commotion—if they hadn’t already been watching the air battle—and come running. He didn’t want them in harm’s way, but they would defend him and motivate other Golden Islanders to do the same if required. 

Moon landed with a hard thump and waited, his heart hammering. What were Raksura doing here, anyway? Had they somehow heard about him and come to kidnap or challenge him?

When the strangers landed, they shifted down to groundling all at once. It felt like a goodwill gesture, so Moon forced himself to do the same. 

Jade, who unlike the others was still scaly and blue in her wingless shape, did not speak. She seemed to be trying not to stare, which just made Moon uneasy because her companions were definitively staring. She was also holding the dead ruler’s head, but that just meant she knew it had to be buried, not anything sinister. 

One of Jade’s companions came forward. “I, ah. Hello, consort. I’m Balm, and this is Jade, a sister queen of Indigo Cloud. Is your court based here?”

“I live here with my family,” Moon said warily. Sometimes he felt like a fraud when he pretended to be part of Delin’s family, despite their assurances that he was very much theirs, but at the moment it felt prudent to claim them as his and make sure these people knew he was neither alone nor defenseless. “Why did you come here?”

“We seek to trade for the use of one of the flying crafts,” Balm said. “We didn’t know there were any Raksura here.”

To Moon’s great relief, he saw dock agents approaching, and, behind them, very welcome faces. Moon nodded towards the dock agents. “Speak to those people, then. They’ll help you set up a trade. I need to get to my siblings.” He scrambled off to join them. 

Diar was unfortunately observant. “Aren’t those Raksura? What language was that you were speaking?”

“Uh, I don’t know. I suppose it’s the Raksura tongue. It just came to me.” 

“What do they want here?” Niran asked, as suspicious as ever. 

“They want to trade. It’s nothing to do with us. We might as well go home.” 

“But Moon,” Diar said, “Don’t you want to speak to them more? They might know where you came from, what happened.”

Moon shook his head, finding it hard to explain. “How would they know? It’s pointless.” The way that Jade woman had looked at him, or not looked at him, was unnerving. He looped an arm about Diar, the other about Niran, and towed them back towards the market. “So, what are we shopping for?”


	3. Chapter 3

As soon as Delin heard about the visiting Raksura, he wanted to go meet them.

Moon viewed this enthusiasm with suspicion. “Is it a coincidence they’re here?” he asked. “Did you send a letter?” 

Delin’s brows furrowed. “I admit I’ve been trying to gather information on Raksura despite your misgivings, but I’ve never shared any information about you. I wouldn’t endanger you with such carelessness. Neither did I attempt to contact them.”

Moon relaxed at once. His foster father had never lied to him and was unlikely to start now. “I’ll go with you.”

“That might not be wise. We still don’t know what they might think of your situation. You said they seemed uneasy with you.”

“Well, you can’t go alone,” Niran put in. Moon was in complete agreement. 

Diar shook her head at them like they were being silly. “These visitors won’t dare make trouble if they want their trading to succeed. Surely they didn’t come all the way out here just to get upset about our family and turn right back. Whatever they feel about us, or Moon, they’ll keep quiet about it.”

“Not everybody is reasonable like you,” Niran told his sister darkly. 

Odds were that at least one of the Raksura visitors harbored the kind of interspecies-adoption-is-unnatural prejudice that made Niran get into bar fights on his behalf, but Moon didn’t get the impression they were looking for trouble. Now that the shock of meeting other Raksura was past, he was even curious about their business here. Still, he didn’t want Delin to go alone. Being cautious never hurt. 

In the end, Moon and Niran both followed Delin out the door. 

Diar sent them off with a cheerful wave, calling out, “Don’t let Grandfather harass them!” 

Which, well. Diar had a point there. Delin was carrying rather a lot of writing material. 

When they were asked, in an unwarranted condescending manner, why they wanted to see the Raksura party, Delin put on his Important Scholar voice. He only deployed it against people who annoyed him and it was rather effective. “They’re distant relatives of my foster son. We can’t possibly let them leave without inviting them for breakfast.”

They were ushered in a room where four groundling-shape Raksura were picking listlessly at platters of food heavy on fish and seaweed items. Jade and Balm weren’t there, presumably still busy with trade discussions. 

“Hello,” Delin said affably. “I am Delin-Evran-Lindel, a scholar.” He immediately unrolled a scroll and held it aloof. “Is this an accurate depiction of your kind?”

One came forward. “Hello, I’m Chime.” He waved vaguely behind him. “These are Song, Root, and Branch.” He studied the scroll. “If the scales are black, then this is a consort. Warriors are similar, but they never have black scales, and the proportions aren’t quite the same. This is very good.”

Moon couldn’t help a sigh, because of course the person shown in the sketch was him, in his other shape. Moon had been hanging back in the doorway, behind Niran, but his sigh attracted attention.

“Oh! You’re the one!” the middle Raksura said, not very coherently. If the names had been given in order, then that was Root.

Chime looked at Moon, then back at the sketch. Clearly he saw the resemblance. “You’re the consort who helped,” he said cautiously. “You said your family lives here?”

Moon crossed his arms defensively. “You’re looking at them. Delin is my foster father and Niran my foster brother.”

This seemed to baffle Chime. “But, ah, where’s your court?”

If Moon had had spines at the moment they would have been rising. He tried not to sound too hostile as he spelled it out. “I don’t have one.”

Root blurted in apparent alarm, “What if he’s a feral solitary that eats groundlings?”

Ahh, there it was. Moon felt bitterly right, once again, to have expected some sort of prejudice to crop up. 

The lone female of the group, Song, hissed and slapped Root in the head. “Shut up!”

Chime looked deathly embarrassed. “Ignore him. Root doesn’t think before he speaks.”

“But then why is he alone?” Root demanded, ducking away from potential further slaps.

“We found Moon when he was but a child,” Delin said, slow and deliberate. “My research indicates that Raksura live in great communal hives, so I don’t understand how a child could have been abandoned so.”

“We don’t abandon fledglings,” Chime said, evidently stung. “But bad things happen to courts, sometimes.” The other Raksura looked acutely uncomfortable. 

“Are you aware of a court that might have been in difficulty about thirty five turns ago?” 

“There’s been a few destroyed courts. Maybe a queen could identify his lineage. Not Jade, but maybe an older one…”

The room had another doorway on the opposite side; Jade and Balm came through it, both looking discouraged. 

“They won’t let us have a flying boat,” Jade said at once. “Too dangerous, they say.”

“What did you need a wind ship for?” Delin inquired.

Jade only glanced distractedly at Delin. “To get our court away from the Fell.”

“Hmm. Perhaps you should tell me more. The traders are not the only ones who own ships.”

Niran, who had until then done nothing but glare suspiciously at everybody, stirred at last. “Grandfather, what are you thinking? If they don’t know anything about Moon, we don’t need to get involved.”

“We didn’t need to get involved at all,” Moon muttered. He didn’t like how unwillingly fascinated he was by these people, especially Jade. He couldn’t stop staring. She wasn’t wearing her wings right now, but she was still striking. Her blue scales looked soft, and beautiful, and he wanted to either get the hell away from her or get really, really close. The conflicting urges were driving him nuts. 

Jade looked straight at Moon, then glanced around in some confusion. 

“The consort was found and raised by these groundlings,” Chime said quickly. “He has no clutchmate or warrior to speak for him.” It took a moment for Moon to realize that had been said in Raksura instead of the trade language.

Jade jerked to meet Delin’s gaze. “Did I understand correctly that you raised the consort standing behind you?”

“For all intents and purposes, yes.” 

“I…see.” Jade procured a pillow from a seat and settled on the floor with it. “If you tell me about that, I will tell you about the Fell.”

Delin looked to Moon. “Do you object?”

Moon shrugged and looked away, knowing Delin would take this as permission.

*

To nobody’s surprise, the visiting Raksura’s tale of woe gained Delin’s immediate sympathy. Moon, placated by Jade’s easy acceptance of his groundlings, was willing to admit he didn’t want to let a whole Raksura court be eaten by Fell either. Maybe he’d let them eat Root, though.

“We’ll all get eaten,” Niran said darkly as they walked back home. “There’s no good reason to go.”

“We’ve been to many dangerous places for less profit than this,” Delin said, patting the bag of huge pearls that had been offered as payment. 

“You’ve never been interested in profits,” Niran shot back. “You’re just a bleeding heart!”

“And a thrill-seeker,” Moon murmured. Oh, Delin would say he sought knowledge above all, but he clearly preferred the kind of knowledge you got while venturing into the unknown over the kind of knowledge you got by sitting safe at home with books. Not that Moon minded, exactly; he liked adventuring. 

Delin smiled serenely. “But Elen likes profits and these lovely pearls will make her happy to agree.”

The rest of the family, when solicited for opinions, backed Delin’s decision. Moon was uncomfortably aware they might have voted that way because of him, even though he hadn’t said anything. 

They set out the very next day on three exploration ships, carrying the Raksura back to their colony with all haste. Some of them, anyway: the two named Balm and Branch had been sent ahead to warn the colony.

“I don’t know why I’m here,” Moon muttered to no one in particular. 

“To keep Grandfather from getting eaten by Fell?” Niran suggested. “That’s why I’m here, anyway.”

Even if Delin hadn’t been aboard, Moon would still have felt compelled to come along and protect Diar, who was always in charge of their expeditions, and all the crew. So, really, he would have been here in any case. He was just on edge because of their guests. 

At first the four Raksura kept to themselves, sitting around and looking anxious. Delin shortly went and put himself in the middle, chatting away happily. Moon lurked nearby just in case…what? They tried to eat Delin? He didn’t know. But he had to be nearby. 

Niran came to sit with him. “It’s interesting seeing them use the same body language you do,” he said meditatively. “The angry lifted spines, the grumpy low spines.”

Moon, who sat in winged shape half because he always considered himself on lookout duty and half because he was somehow compelled to imitate the other Raksura, tried to swat at Niran with his tail. Niran, wise to this trick, caught his tail mid-swing. “—and here’s the tail swish of annoyance. They do that too.”

Moon pulled his tail free and huffed. “We’re the same species, what did you expect?”

“It’s normal, yeah? So why are so you annoyed with them? You’ve been glaring all morning.”

“I’m not—”

“Are you going give me the hiss of ‘I want you to shut up’?”

Moon swallowed his hiss and went to sit elsewhere, alone. Niran was unbearably annoying sometimes. 

The friendliest Raksura, the warrior called Chime, wandered over in a manner that was clearly meant to seem casual but wouldn’t have fooled anybody. “Do you mind if I sit here?” he asked.

“Do whatever you like.”

Chime sat and watched Niran walk off deck. “That is Niran, yes? We were wondering… Is he more like a favorite or a clutchmate to you?”

Moon hissed. “I told you before, he’s my foster brother. That’s a clutchmate.”

Chime hesitated. “Yes, but… I mean, he’s male, but does he speak for you? Or is it the other one, Diar? Delin said you speak for yourself, but…” 

Moon stared, sensing there was some sort of cultural miscommunication going on. “What are you trying to ask?”

“Our sister queen Jade would like to speak with you, but she doesn’t want to offend anyone by not getting permission first.”

“She doesn’t need permission to talk to anyone on the ship.” Then he quickly corrected, “Well, unless they don’t want to talk to her.” 

“So, do you? Want to talk to her?”

Moon couldn’t keep his tail from lashing out of frustration. These people may be of his own species, but he didn’t understand anything they said. “What would she want to talk to me for?”

Chime hesitated again. “She likes you.”

“She—oh.” Thanks to Delin, Moon had some idea what it meant for a queen to like a consort, a breeding male. 

Moon wouldn’t have said he was running away, but he was certainly removing himself from the situation really fast. He nearly collided with Diar in the narrow hallway.

“What’s wrong?” Diar said in alarm, grabbing at his arm. 

“Nothing. I just wanted to get away from them.” 

Diar narrowed his eyes at him. “It’s not nothing. What did they do?”

“She likes me,” Moon blurted. 

“Who?”

“The blue one. The queen.”

“Well, yes? She keeps sneaking glances. It’s pretty obvious she’s been taken with you from the moment she met you.” 

“You could have warned me!” Moon didn’t know why he was getting worked up. “She doesn’t even know me, how can she like me? We met yesterday!” And he shouldn’t be attracted to a person he’d just met either! 

Diar began to look alarmed. “Are you worried she’ll harass you? They should know better than that. They mess with you and they’re out of rescue ships. Grandfather is kind, but he won’t stand for anyone treating you badly.” She squeezed his arm. “ _We_ won’t stand for it.”

Moon didn’t say ‘what if there’s no Fell and it was all a ruse to get me out here and kidnap me’ because he wasn’t a delusional, paranoid person and he’d seen the ruler himself. But he still thought it. Instead, he said, “I know, I know. I just want to go have a nap.” 

Hiding under the covers in bed wasn’t childish if you were there to nap. Or pretend to, while wondering what in the world was wrong with you. Jade hadn’t done anything to him, so why was he freaking out? 

Diar patted his arm reassuringly. “You do get dramatic when you’re tired. But if that woman tries anything, you tell me and I’ll make her regret it, okay?” 


	4. Chapter 4

JADE

Jade tried not to wince openly when Moon bolted away from Chime and into the boat’s belly. That was not the reaction a queen wished to inspire in a prospective consort.

“You weren’t supposed to scare him off,” Song scolded when Chime slunk back in failure.

The groundling Delin wore an expression difficult to interpret. “Ah. You relayed Jade’s desire to talk to him?”

“I did,” Chime admitted. “I don’t know what I did wrong.”

“You have to understand Moon is very attached to us,” Delin began, “and very angry his people never came back for him and the others. He doesn’t want to forgive you or like you.”

“We aren’t the ones who abandoned him,” Root said righteously. He stopped there because Song had twitched in his direction.

“It’s all the same to a child,” Delin said.

There was a moment of silence because nobody could rightly argue with that. Jade simply couldn’t envision any circumstance so terrible that she wouldn’t go back for any missing court member. Even if her colony were attacked by Fell, which was rather likely at this point, she wouldn’t leave anyone behind, least of all a fledgling. 

“You don’t think I should talk to him?” Jade asked.

“No, I think you should. But you have to be prepared for the eventuality he will reject you.” There was, perhaps, the slightest him of warning there. It would have stiffened Jade’s spines if it weren’t exactly like a sire’s interest in a consort’s wellbeing. Nobody, not even a groundling, wanted a consort to be coerced by a foreign queen. 

“I wouldn’t force any consort,” Jade said. 

“That is good to know, but he may or may not believe it.” Delin smiled. “He is, perhaps, a little feral.” 

Jade did wince at that, because it proved someone had said something indelicate. Oh, she would have words with Root and his habit of blurting out every thought he had. Delin was acting like Moon’s sire, and both of them would be afforded all applicable courtesy, or else.

“To be clear,” Jade said slowly, “I do have your permission to court him?” 

Normally one sought permission from the birth queen foremost, but a sire’s permission, especially one of advanced age as Delin seemed to be, was also acceptable. Another option was to approach the consort’s queen clutchmates, so Jade decided she would have a chat with Diar to ensure there was no problem. Diar did not have the kind of aggressiveness expected from a Raksura queen, but she was clearly willing and able to wield authority among her people. It was close enough for propriety.

Perhaps she was being a little hasty here, pursuing a consort she’d just met whose bloodline was unknown, but she didn’t much care. Moon was beautiful and thought nothing of going into danger to help her colony. If only she’d known to bring courting gifts…

“You don’t need permission,” Delin said affably, “but you can have my blessing if you like. The rest is up to Moon.”

And that, unfortunately, seemed to be the problem.

*  
MOON

The Raksura were out there flying, stretching their wings alongside the ship, except for Chime, who watched the others wistfully. Moon, who’d emerged from his cabin because he’d grown too bored to hide any longer, cautiously came to stand at the railing. “Do you have to stay on the ship because you’re on watch?”

Chime flinched, which seemed an odd reaction. “Ah, no. I just don’t like flying.”

“Uh, why?” That was like a groundling saying they didn’t like using their legs to walk around. 

“I’m not good at it,” Chime said defensively. 

“Do you have an old injury that bothers you?” 

“No.”

Well, if Chime didn’t want to talk… Moon started retreating.

Chime half-reached towards him. “No, stay!”

Moon stopped where he was. Raksura were confusing and he didn’t like it. 

“I’m sorry.” Chime sighed. “I didn’t used to have wings. I was an Arbora. That’s, ah, a wingless Raksura, if you don’t know. But the court was under so much pressure that I changed. It’s a sore subject.”

“Is that really possible?” Moon twitched. “Does it happen the other way?” The mere idea of it was terrifying. His survival, and his ability to defend his groundlings, had often depended on his wings.

“When courts are in trouble they need more warriors than Arbora so they can flee somewhere safe. There’s no reason for it to happen the other way.”

“That sound very confusing,” Moon offered. 

Chime sagged against the railing. “You could say that. So I’m just…not good at flying. I can go in straight lines as fast as anybody else and I can mostly land without faceplanting, but it’s stressful. I always worry I’ll twist a wing and fall and die.”

“Would you like me to coach you?”

Moon was afraid Chime would take offence, but he brightened instead. “Oh, that would be nice. But can we wait after the others go to sleep? After flying like that they’re going to nap. I just…I don’t need to hear anybody’s comments.”

Moon was pretty sure Chime was talking about Root specifically, although he might have been self-conscious in general. “Sure. We’ll do that.”

*

They only had a day or two before they reached the colony, so Moon pushed Chime, making him fly all afternoon long around the boat. What Chime needed most was practice, so they were going to squeeze in as much of it as possible in the time they had. They were travelling over water for most of that day, which did cut down on the odds of smashing into anything.

Playing teacher helped Moon take his mind off worrying whether the Raksura colony was already dead, or, not much better, all alive and ready to have opinions about him. Chime had mumbled something about their small colony being in desperate need of a consort, which accounted for Jade’s interest in him. Moon didn’t want to care what stupid Raksura thought, but apparently he did care, because he was stung by the implied notion that only a desperate queen would be interested. If that’s what was going on, he was just going to ignore Jade and that would be that.

Moon felt sore by the end of the lesson—he wasn’t used to staying in flight all day anymore—but no so much he couldn’t dive for the flatfish loitering near the surface. Chime helped him haul it on deck, because it was bigger than he was.

“I didn’t know we could catch fish like that,” Chime said, somewhat bemused. 

“Want some?” Moon offered. It was big, and he’d stuffed himself full before they left the island. 

“We don’t really eat fish…”

“Fine, don’t have any then.”

“I’d like to try it,” Jade said, almost shyly, as if he might flee because she’d spoken to him. Moon pretended her voice didn’t do weird things to his insides and pushed the fish to her. 

By the time the fish was done to scales and bones, everybody had had a share. Moon felt positively social. 

The next day they were flying over forested land, keeping well above the trees to avoid tempting predators. Moon and Chime had another flying practice, starting after the other Raksura had gone to nap because Chime was still shy of having an audience. 

Well, at least they had a reduced one; Jade stood at the railing watching. Moon tried not to let her get to him, but he was hyperaware of her lingering gaze. 

His distraction nearly got them both killed. 

Jade called out a warning at the same time Moon noticed an alarming shadow falling over them. Something had taken a dive from above the cloud cover, probably targeting Chime because he flew a little like someone injured. Moon had but a few heartbeats to tilt his wings and smash into Chime, pushing him out of the way, before folding his wings tight against his back. 

The shadow plowed into him, huge talons trying to find purchase between his scales. They mostly failed to penetrate, one closing around the top of his wing and the other half around his side, squeezing him hard. The violence of the impact rattled Moon’s skull. By the time he shook off the disorientation, Jade was in the air and coming fast. 

Wriggling, Moon clawed blindly upward. He could only just about reach above the hard talons and into feather-covered flesh, but that was enough. Between getting clawed by its prey and attacked by an angry queen, the bird didn’t like the situation. It dropped him to better flee. 

Moon tried to spread his wings to stop his tumble, but one joint hurt so much he reflectively half-closed that wing again. He went spiraling sideways, completely off-balance. 

He caught glimpses of Jade trying to reach him before he hit the canopy. “Close your wings!” she yelled. 

He did, and dropped like a stone for the few stomach-churning moments before Jade grabbed him roughly and bundled him close to her chest. Moon had carried people in flight before, but he’d never been carried. And certainly not by someone who smelled so nice. The smell made him want to relax into her, so he stubbornly didn’t. 

The moment Moon’s feet touched deck, he was swarmed by people wanting to know if he was okay.

“My wing joint hurt,” he complained. He would also have a spectacular bruise on his side, but that was hardly life threatening. He was far more concerned about his wing. 

One Raksura and one Golden Islander immediately peered and poked at the injured joint. 

“It’s swollen,” Niran reported. “Doesn’t look like the time you broke it, though.”

“We have a simple that should help,” Chime said, leaping away. 

A few moments later, the unhappy joint was slathered in a creamy mixture that felt cool and pleasant. 

“Don’t shift for a couple hours,” Chime said, “so it has time to work. You’ll be fine by morning.”

“It works that fast?” Moon gingerly stretched, and hissed. 

Chime poked him in the side. “Here?”

“Ow! That hurts!”

“Thought so,” Chime said, not even sorry. “You could have said.” He didn’t even wait for permission before slathering some more cream there. 

Moon had to admit his bruised side immediately felt better. He gingerly sat down on deck, his injured wing half open because it was the best position for his sore joint.

Niran looked at him critically. “You’re going to be hungry after that stunt, aren’t you? You always get hungry after you do something stupid. You’re lucky that thing didn’t break your fool neck, at the speed it was going.”

And Niran always got snippy when Moon got hurt, but Moon didn’t feel like starting an argument. “Food would be nice.”

Jade had stepped away the moment she put him down, as if he might spook. But when food arrived and he started eating, she came to sit down close enough to talk.

“Thank you for shielding Chime,” Jade said quietly. “He wouldn’t have had the reflex to close his wings to protect them.”

Chime winced in what appeared to be confirmation. 

Moon shrugged off the thanks, uncomfortable. “I should have been keeping a lookout.”

“No, I should have. I was too busy staring, so you had to protect Chime. Thank you.”

Moon valiantly ignored the admission she’d been staring at him. “It doesn’t bother you? I thought consorts aren’t supposed to do stuff like that. Delin said consorts are supposed to be ‘shy creatures who rarely venture far from their homes’ or something like that.” It sounded as silly now as it had the first time he’d heard it. 

Jade took a moment to answer. “Large courts can afford to be fussy but we’re fighting to survive. So I don’t care what other courts think is proper.”

“I can do fighting,” Moon offered.

“I see that.”

She didn’t look displeased and Moon…didn’t hate it.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Important: Many lines in this chapter are lifted directly from the original scenes. I wish I'd thought of a completely different way to tap back into the original plot, but I didn't, so a lot of this will be very familiar.
> 
> ...........

Moon spent the next morning at forced rest, watching the jungle go by. His wing joint felt perfectly fine but Niran and Chime had already yelled at him once for wanting to go test his joint’s recovery in flight. Jade hadn’t said anything, but she’d looked disapproving. He already had one overprotective family member; did he really want more?

“Everybody is overbearing,” Moon complained. 

Delin, busy sketching Niran and Chime leaning side by side against the railing, said mildly, “Perhaps they feel one shouldn’t risk worsening an injury right before possibly meeting a Fell flight. Rest while you can.”

Moon gave up, because when even Delin thought he was being an idiot, then he was almost certainly being an idiot. He fell asleep right where he was, sprawled on deck and listening to the faint, familiar scratching of Delin’s quill. 

“Someone’s coming!” That was Root, calling down from the top of the mast. 

Moon shook himself awake, judging that he’d napped a couple hours. Surprisingly, the incoming turned out to be neither Balm nor Branch. Instead it was a stranger, a young warrior. The warrior landed breathing hard and said to Jade, “Stone said not to bring the groundling boats any closer. The Fell have been to the colony again.”

Once they’d ascertained this did not mean the colony had been attacked, only visited, everybody calmed down and the warrior added, “Stone wants you to leave the boats out here and come meet him at the Blue Stone Temple.”

Delin, when told of these developments, was unperturbed. “We ‘ll winch the ships down in the trees and wait for news.”

“Chime, stay here,” Jade said. “Song and Root, with me.”

Moon surprised himself by asking, “Can I come?” If they’d asked him to go, he would have thought it was a trap, but Jade was so clearly not paying attention to him right now that it made him want to go.

Jade looked at Delin, who sounded mildly amused as he said, “Moon still doesn’t need my permission.” His voice lost the amusement, however, when he added, “But do be careful, all of you.”

“You can come,” Jade told Moon, right before taking off. 

Moon took flight without so much as a twinge from his recently injured joint. When he realized Chime was right behind him, he twisted around in flight and called out, “Didn’t Jade tell you to stay with the ship?”

Chime gave him a look. “She meant I should stay with you!”

Moon didn’t know what to do with that information, so he ignored it. Raksura were weird.

The meeting place was in the forest, in a big square structure with open walls that had been built over a large pool. It might normally have been a pretty pool, but at the moment a large bloated carcass floated into it. The stench of death overpowered everything else. 

There was a rush of air as others arrived; first Balm and Branch, then a creature so huge and black that Moon was momentarily convinced that it was a kethel chasing them. His heart rate sped up, then calmed as he realized it wasn’t a kethel at all--too different--and besides nobody was panicking. But then what was it? 

The huge creature put down the pale-scaled person it was carrying—an Arbora, Moon guessed—and turned into a groundling with grey hair and skin. This grey groundling glanced at him. “You’re Moon? Balm told us about you.” 

“What are you?” Moon blurted. 

The grey-skinned person raised an eyebrow. 

“Stone is a line grandfather, a consort like you,” Chime said quickly. “Consorts get bigger as they age and he’s very old.”

Well. Someone called Stone had visited the Golden Isles a long time ago and Delin had been emphatic that this Stone had been astonishingly large, but Moon would have assumed it wasn’t the same person. Yet it must be; surely there weren’t two huge Raksura named Stone in the area.

“How long until I get that big?” Moon asked urgently. 

Stone didn’t smile but Moon sensed amusement anyway. “Not every consort becomes a line grandfather, but you’ll grow much bigger with time. Give it a few decades.”

“Oh,” Moon was a little disappointed. Everybody said consorts didn’t fight, but Stone’s scaled form had been sporting more than a few scars. A consort that big could probably do whatever he wanted and could laugh off most predators besides.

Stone looked at the short, wing-less Raksura. “Flower, you really didn’t see this coming?”

Flower was staring at Moon thoughtfully. “He was in the vision,” she said. “We thought we were looking at groundlings, but he was with them.” 

Moon turned to Chime, who was very quickly becoming his go-to translator for Raksura matters, and whispered, “What are they talking about?”

“Oh, we came to get a flying boat because the mentors had a vision of an island in a yellow sea and a flying boat above it crewed with groundlings. Since the mentors were trying to ask for a way to help the court, it seemed pretty clear we should go get a boat. Stone gave us directions.” 

“How is that clear? The boat could have been full of bad people! It could have been a sign to stay away!”

“No, the vision felt good. Hopeful. It wasn’t a warning.” 

“How do you know? You didn’t see it, did you?”

Chime drew back, obviously stung. “I’ve seen visions before and Flower is very good! She wouldn’t be wrong.” Chime furrowed his brow. “But maybe we misinterpreted? Maybe we won’t need the boats? Maybe the vision was trying to tell us to come find you?” He brightened. “Oh, maybe that means you’ll stay with us and be our consort!”

“You already have a consort,” Moon pointed out. A huge, terrifying one. 

“Line grand-fathers don’t count. They don’t lead courts and they’re past breeding age.”

The whole concept, Moon decided, was extremely alarming. He did not want to be featured in magical visions that told people what to do. 

“The vision must have been about the wind ships,” Moon said firmly. “I’m going home as soon as we get your court away.”

“But—”

Moon glared and Chime’s spines drooped in submission, even as he hazarded, “You might change your mind though.”

They were interrupted by Stone asking, “Do you smell that?”

“Everybody can smell the dead grasseater,” Jade replied, puzzled.

“No, there’s something else—”

Moon heard a rush of wings overhead and spun around, looking toward the skylight. It looked like more Raksura peering in, but he wasn’t sure. Moon tried to shift…and nothing happened.

He tried not to panic. “Chime, I can’t shift.”

His panic must have been evident anyway, because Chime said quickly, “It’s okay, it’s okay. That’s Pearl, our reigning queen. I told you about her. Queens can do that.”

Chime had had a lot to say about Pearl being uncooperative about them moving the court, and possibly being less than sane since she was actually talking to Fell, but he hadn’t mentioned this awful power!

Moon fought the urge to bolt through the jungle and not stop until he was back with the ships. He couldn’t be sure he would regain the ability to shift before some jungle predator ate him. He still took a few steps back, glaring accusingly at everybody in sight. “Was this a trap to capture me?” 

“What? No!” Jade said, shocked like he’d said something terribly offensive. 

Chime made urgent motions at him. “Pearl’s not doing it at you, she’s doing it at everybody down here because she’s mad at us. Just come here and pretend to be a groundling, maybe she won’t notice you…”

Stone snorted like that was the dumbest thing he’d ever heard. Moon might not know a whole lot about queens, but he was pretty sure queens didn’t “not notice” consorts. 

A large Raksura queen dropped through the skylight in the roof, her scales a mix of gold and indigo. This must be Pearl. Raksura warriors, Branch included, landed next.

Moon scooted back towards Chime, who was a lot less threatening than this huge queen. He was beginning to wish some Fell had showed up instead. 

Pearl honed in on him at once. “Who is that?” Despite her words, she didn’t actually look surprised. Somebody had told her.

“This is Moon of the Golden Isles, a groundling-raised consort,” Jade said combatively. “His groundling family lent us flying boats.”

Moon registered the guilt on Branch’s face, apparently at the same time others did. 

“Branch.” Flower didn’t raise her voice, but Branch flinched. “It was your idea to come here.” She lifted a brow. “You fooled us very easily. We didn’t suspect a thing.”

Helpless, Branch turned to Pearl. The queen said, “He was being loyal.”

“Loyal?” Jade’s spines flared. “We have to speak in secret because you keep telling the Fell everything we do!” 

Pearl rounded on her in fury. “I’ve told the Fell nothing!” she snapped. “I’m trying to buy time.”

“Buy time?” Stone repeated. “How? The Fell want to kill us all—”

Pearl shook her head. “That’s not what they want.”

Moon missed part of the arguing because he was debating going for that jungle retreat after all. That Pearl made him feel trapped and he wanted out. Surely the power that kept him from shifting had a limit… He pushed at it as hard as he could but nothing happened. 

“You’re saying the Fell want to breed with us,” Stone said. 

_That_ got Moon’s attention. 

There was silence, then everybody looked to Flower for answers. “It might be possible,” she said reluctantly. “The mentors who study the Fell have always believed that we came from the same source.”

There was further arguing, that Moon mostly missed because he was pacing along the back wall, as far from Pearl as he could get without actually running away, testing to see if he could shift yet and trying very hard not to think about things like Raksura breeding with Fell. He was aware of Chime giving him occasional worried glances, though everybody else seemed utterly consumed by the unfortunate topic at hand. 

It was almost a relief when the Fell really did appear. A huge kethel charged out of the pool—the nasty pool that reeked so strongly of death they couldn’t smell anything else—straight at Stone, knocking everybody else aside.

Moon shifted—finally!—and rushed forward as a second kethel heaved itself out of the pool. It had a huge tumor on its chest, just like— The sac split open and dakti spilled out. 

Moon fell in next to Jade and they tackled the second kethel together. It was startlingly easy to work with her, so easy it was seductive. He could have this, if he were willing to give up his groundlings. With a little help from Balm they took the kethel down like it was nothing.

Looking round for Chime, Moon realized all the Fell were dead and that the consort Stone was down, badly injured. Moon spotted Chime just before someone began wailing, bent over a still body. Branch’s body. Moon winced and paced away. He didn’t know these people and felt like he was intruding. He half-listened as they argued about whether poor Branch had betrayed them to the Fell.

If Branch had told the Fell everything…

“I’m going back to the ships,” Moon said abruptly, suddenly terrified. If a single kethel could take down a consort as huge as Stone, his family had no chance against one. 

Jade just said, “Chime, go with Moon to warn the Islanders. Come to the colony as soon as you can.”

They went as quickly as Chime could fly. The ships had been winched down but Moon had practice spotting the tip of the masts sticking up among the trees. He landed hard on deck, knees weak with the relief of finding everybody alive.

“The Fell know we’re here!” he gasped out. “Make it look like everybody ran out into the forest, put everybody on the Dathea, and go!” The Dathea was smaller, but it was the fastest. 

“Worth a try,” Diar said. She gave the orders and crew scrambled to obey. 

Moon stood there a few moments, catching his breath and trying to think through his panic while Delin and Niran looked at him with concern. 

“I’m staying,” Moon said. 

“Me too,” Niran said immediately. “Between us we’ll be able to take the ships back.”

Moon hadn’t been thinking about that, but he nodded agreement anyway.

Delin looked at him a long moment. “Be careful.” He pulled Moon into a surprisingly fierce hug. “Send letters.”

“Uh,” Moon said. “I hope getting rid of the Fell won’t take that long.” Something occurred to him, “Ohh, I need to go get the—”

“Niran’s already gone to grab that,” Diar said as she walked up and grabbed Moon for a quick hug of her own. “Do not let him get killed. Do not get yourself killed. Okay?”

“Yes Captain,” Moon said.

“Good.” She squeezed his arm and carried on with her work. 

Moon made a quick dash for a few personal items and his emergency pack, returning on deck to find Niran and Chime waiting. He stashed Niran under one arm and they were good to go. 

Chime guided them towards the colony. Since they were flying into the wind they smelled the Fell long before they got there. It smelled of blood, too, and that wasn’t good news. 

Moon spotted a likely clearing to land and went for it.

Niran, once set down, staggered sideways. “Still hate flying,” he grunted. “Why’d you stop?”

“I can smell blood and Fell on the wind,” Moon said quietly. “I don’t want them to see you; if they do it might make them look harder for the others.”

Niran nodded. “I’ll wait here.”

Moon looked at Chime, who’d followed them down. “Can you stay with Niran while I catch up with Jade and the others? I think I can find the colony by following the smell…” He really wanted to see the situation for himself, but he also really wanted to keep Niran safe. 

Chime hesitated, then settled his wings. “Yes, all right. I’ll stay here.”

“Thank you.”

Moon leapt back into the air and resumed following the wind. He went past hills and into a valley with a shallow river and a sort of pyramid building straddling it. Kethels were circling above, proof that he had found the colony and that it was too late. 

Jade, Pearl, and the warriors stood on a bare hilltop with a group of perhaps forty Arbora. Moon wondered how many were still in the colony and whether any of them were still alive.

Moon banked to land near Jade, who looked slightly surprised to see him. “I sent them back home,” he said shortly.

“Where’s Chime?”

“I told him to wait for me.”

They relayed to Moon what had happened, including the most worrying item; that the Fell had somehow kept the Raksura from shifting to defend their home. That ability was supposed to be a Raksura queen power, not a Fell power. It was all bad news and it only got worse when a ruler flew towards them.

“Kathras,” Pearl greeted it. “How did you do this?”

“They wanted to join us,” he said. “We hold no one prisoner.” His gaze moved over to them, settling on Moon immediately. Moon was getting tired of being singled out so quickly by everybody he met and he wanted nothing so much as to tear into this creature. 

Jade watched Kathras with predatory calm. She said, “Who was your spy?”

Kathras inclined his head toward her. “Your new consort.”

Moon hissed in pure surprise, then felt like a fool. He was the obvious choice, a sudden newcomer to the court. 

“Predictable,” Jade said with a sigh.

Jade’s reaction soothed Moon’s temper some, but he still wanted to tear the Fell apart. 

The conversation predictably ended with Pearl taking a swipe at the ruler, but he made away and the queens knew better than to engage. There were too many hostages involved.

“We need to go before they come after us,” Pearl said. 

Nobody argued with that.


	6. Chapter 6

MOON

Stone was too wounded to either fly or shift to groundling so several people, Moon included, helped carry him on foot through the jungle. It took such a long time for them to reach the chosen campsite that by the time they arrived, the Arbora had turned that site into a nearly undetectable blind. The only light inside came from glowing plants.

“Is Stone going to make it?” Moon asked Flower. It would be nice to get to talk to another consort. They’d barely interacted so far, but Moon had a feeling they’d get along just fine. 

“He’ll be all right, but it’ll take days. Now come on, the queens are making plans. We need to be there.”

“I don’t think Pearl will welcome me. Maybe I should wait here.” He wasn’t in a hurry to deal with her again. 

Flower shook her head impatiently. “You were in the vision for a reason. We asked for help, and you were shown to us.”

Moon gave in. “Let me get Niran; he brought some things that could be useful.”

Niran had apparently been helping to make the blind; he handed over an armful of moss when Moon called out his name. The pack was still on his back. Good, he hadn’t taken chances about misplacing it.

They found Chime, Balm, Jade, Pearl, and a few others sitting on the bare ground on the very edge of the blind, nearly outside. 

“So tell us, Moon,” Pearl said. “How did the Fell know you were new to the court?”

“Wasn’t it Branch who betrayed you to the Fell?” Niran shot back. “He knew about Moon.” The unblinking, nearly hostile way Niran said it made Moon wonder what exactly the Arbora had been telling him. Was there already gossip about Branch’s death? 

One of the warriors near Pearl snarled. “It wasn’t Branch.”

“It could have been,” Niran shot back. “The Fell make groundlings do things all the time. I don’t see why it wouldn’t work on you lot.”

“If it wasn’t him, then whoever it was is still with us,” Moon added. 

“The Fell said it was you,” the warrior said, transferring his hostility to Moon.

Niran snorted. “Yeah, that wasn’t at all a plot to make you doubt your only ally. If I’d been there, he would have probably said it was me. You must be dumb to believe anything a ruler says.”

Niran and the warrior glared at each other. If this had been some groundling drinking place, Moon would have expected them to get into a fistfight at this point. Chime looked like he might want in on the fight too, but if that warrior tried anything, Moon would rip his head off first.

“That’s enough, River,” Pearl finally said. 

Moon turned to Jade and said, “Have you ever heard of a poison for Fell? It works on Raksura too, keeps us from shifting.”

“No.” Jade looked startled. “Do you know about such a thing?”

“Maybe,” Niran said. He dropped his pack to the ground and carefully pulled pressed dried plants from it. “Do any of you recognize this plant? Can we find it here?”

The Arbora present conferred. “That looks like three-leafed purple bow. We can find it.”

Niran and Moon looked at each other and grinned in relief. 

“Good, then we have a weapon,” Moon said. There was nothing for it but to explain what it was and how they’d encountered it. “We met people once who said the Fell didn’t bother them because if a Fell ate any of their people, that Fell died. They explained this to us after the drink they offered us in welcome poisoned me. There was a bit of a fight between Niran accusing them of trying to murder us and them accusing me of being a Fell in disguise…”

“Don’t even try to downplay it,” Niran said grimly. “You were unconscious with weird lines all over you. Grandfather well-nearly threatened to start a war if they didn’t immediately provide the antidote. Which they didn’t even have, those idiots! They just assumed that it was okay to feed Fell-poison to everybody and anybody they encountered.”

Moon started talking over Niran, because otherwise he’d just keep ranting on. “I got better! They agreed I must not be a Fell since I was still alive and gave us the recipe as an apology. We’ve kept plant samples in case it came in handy, but we don’t have much and we never got a chance to test it on a Fell. We’ll need a lot more if we’re to do anything with it.”

“We’ll send the Arbora out in teams to harvest it,” Flower said.

Jade caught Pearl’s eye. “But keep the Aeriat here.” 

Pearl paused for half a second. “Do as she says. Only the assigned teams may go out of the valley.”

If Branch hadn’t been the traitor, then somebody else must be, and the Aeriat were the likeliest suspect. 

It was too late to do much anything else, so they went to bed after eating whatever the Arbora could put together. Moon curled up against Niran, feeling for the first time how far away from home he was. He hadn’t been on his own for so long now that not having the rest of the family around made him nervous. 

Not long after, Chime tentatively came over, settling against Moon’s back. That helped some.  
 

*  
NIRAN

The next day was a constant back and forth of Arbora bringing three-leafed purple bow. When they got around to talking about testing it out on someone, Niran made sure he glowered at everybody so they’d know better than to suggest Moon should be the test subject. In the end they tried it on some kid, who went down hard and fast. Niran turned away with a shudder, remembering how it had felt to watch Moon go down like that without knowing why.

Because he’d turned around, Niran saw Balm step into the trees with a weird backward glance, the way someone might do if they were up to something and didn’t want to be noticed. 

He could be wrong; he didn’t know these Raksura the way he knew Moon. But still… 

Niran trailed after Balm quietly, pretending to be looking at a small paper pad he’d been carting round to take notes for his grandfather. If noticed, he’d make up some question about Jade or queen-consort matches. The “concerned sibling” routine worked really well on Raksura. 

But Balm was weirdly focused now, and did not look back even though he was not as quiet as a Raksura would be. Alarm bells were ringing hard in Niran’s head.

Niran hurried up, not caring now if he were loud. “Hey, Balm! I have a quick question for you!”

Balm turned to look at him with weird, empty eyes. Then she started climbing a tree. 

Niran did the two things he could think of; he let out a piercing whistle to summon Moon-shaped help, and he jumped to grab the spade shape at the end of Balm’s tail. His weight made her slide down—good—and turn on him with wildly slashing claws—not good. He jerked back, feeling a hot trail of fire across his chest. 

Balm tried to turn back to the tree, so he feinted a grab at her tail. She rounded on him again, but this time he was ready to duck. “Help!” he yelled. “Balm is trying to kill me!”

Trashing in the forest told him several people were on their way. 

Moon thankfully made it there first and Niran gestured urgently at the tree Balm was scaling. “Grab her, grab her! Fell got in her head!”

Moon leaped and grabbed Balm, hauling her off the tree. She tried to turn on him, too, but by then several others had arrived, Jade included, and Balm just…stopped. 

“Balm hit me,” Niran said at once, in case someone didn’t grasp the situation. He wasn’t bleeding heavily, but it burned something awful. 

“Balm, what happened?” Jade asked, shocked. “You know groundlings are delicate!” 

Balm shook her head, eyes no longer empty. “I don’t…”

“Niran, what was it you said about the Fell?” Moon said, likely because he wanted the others to hear it from him. If Moon had believed Balm had deliberately hurt Niran, he would have been trying to kill her. 

“The Fell got her,” Niran said. “She was trying to climb above the canopy and fly to them, probably to tell them about the poison. She didn’t answer when I spoke to her and she hurt me when I tried to delay her.”

“I wasn’t!” Balm said, looking hurt and angry by the accusation. 

“Then where were you going?” Moon asked. 

“I was just going to scout!”

“Pearl said Aeriat should stay on the ground, didn’t she?”

Jade took Balm’s wrist and looked at the blood on her claws. “Why did you hurt him?”

“I… I don’t remember.”

Niran wasn’t trying to be dramatic, but he got woozy as the adrenaline wore off and had to lean on Moon, who wrapped an arm around him as support.

“We can talk about it in the blind, after my clutchmate stops bleeding everywhere,” Moon said in a I’m-getting-upset-about-this tone. He, too, had already figured out when to use Raksura culture against them. 

Niran only complained a little about being carried back to the blind. Instead he watched and made sure Jade didn’t release Balm’s wrist. 

An Arbora got his wound cleaned and bandaged while everybody else argued about something to do with mentors looking in people’s minds. Moon was being resistant to the idea and Niran rather approved of the paranoia. If this mind thing was in any way incapacitating, it would leave them vulnerable. Balm hadn’t meant to hurt him, but there were others—that River guy came to mind—who might hurt Moon or him on purpose. 

Pearl and Moon had some kind of stand off, staring at each other dramatically. 

“Why would you check Moon?” Niran said, affecting puzzlement. “He wasn’t involved, so it’s either me or Balm. But maybe do Balm first, because it might be harder with me since I’m not a Raksura.” It might also not be possible at all, but if their magic could spot what was in Balm’s mind then the rest was unimportant.

After the obligatory Raksura argument, Flower went to kneel in front of Balm. Niran couldn’t see what happened from his horizontal position, but after a moment Flower jerked back and said, “It’s true! The Fell taint is in her mind!”

Niran grabbed for his notepad. This mentor ability seemed like the kind of thing Grandfather would want to know about… 

A good while later, Niran jolted awake to hear Balm say, “I’m sorry. Please don’t hold this against Jade.”

“Don’t apologize to me,” Moon replied pointedly. 

Niran didn’t bother opening his eyes. “Don’t worry about it, Balm. Moon’s just grumpy I got hurt. He was mad at me for days after I got stung by a huge bug…as if I’d done that on purpose… Moon, your brooding is keeping me awake. Stop it.”

Point made, Niran drifted back to sleep.

*

“We’re going to use the poison in the water now,” Moon told Niran.

“I wish you wouldn’t get involved,” Niran said glumly, rubbing at his bandages. “But I know you. You’ve never seen a rock in need you didn’t want to defend to the death.” He waved Moon’s attempted reassurances away. “Don’t lie, you’re not even going to be careful. Just go and make sure you kill them before they kill you.”

Moon caught Niran in a hug and Niran grumpily hugged back. “I’ll be back,” Moon promised. 

Time passed terribly slowly because there was nothing to do but wait. Few had been left behind and they were just as quietly worried as he was. If the poison didn’t work as well on Fell as expected, or if too few Fell drank the water… 

And then, finally, news. 

“We got the colony back!” a thick-set Arbora announced gleefully. She was covered in blood, but didn’t seem injured herself. Her glee ebbed to grimness as she explained, “The clutches are safe, but a lot of the soldiers are dead, and the Fell survivors stole some Arbora. Jade and the Aeriat went after them.”

“And Moon?” Niran asked, already pretty sure of the answer.

“He went too.”

Well, if Moon was well enough to go chase Fell, that meant he hadn’t taken any dangerous wounds. 

More waiting ensued. 

Things got less boring, and more busy, as other Arbora trickled in, both the rescuers and the rescued ones. There were wounded to help and many exhausted Raksura grateful for anyone willing to bring them food and water. Those in better shape went out for a quick hunt and soon there was fresh meat to pass around too. There were some grumbles about the meat quality—Niran had no idea what the creature was but it had looked kind of old and stringy—but most chewed mechanically, too tired to care. 

A number of the rescued Arbora did a double take—“is that a groundling?”—but there was always someone else about to handle the query so he didn’t have to explain his presence fifty times. Nobody seemed angry though, just surprised. 

“Is it me or Arbora are less wary of strangers than warriors?” Niran asked an Arbora called Blossom, who had been especially friendly to him so far. None of the warriors had been this friendly except Chime, but that was obviously because Chime was crushing on Moon. Moon probably hadn’t noticed yet. 

Blossom snorted. “Warriors exist to be paranoid about anything and everything that might be a threat. Arbora are much more sensible.”

Niran eventually passed out alone in a corner, but woke up practically covered in Arbora. Blossom was one of them, but he wasn’t entirely sure who the others were. Yeah, these were Moon’s people alright. Aggressive cuddlers all of them. 

Someone excitedly called out, “Stone’s awake! Really awake!”

There was a mass migration to see Stone, exclaim over Stone, and tell Stone everything he’d missed in great detail. With both queens gone, it seemed leadership fell to him. 

“Do we still have the flying boats?” Stone inquired.

“The groundlings left us two,” Bone reported. “We checked they were still there this morning. The Fell didn’t destroy them.”

“I can fly one,” Niran said, pushing a little forward to be seen, “but I need Moon to fly the second one.”

“We’re leaving this place,” Stone said. “We’ll salvage whatever we can from the ruins and go. We’ll have an Arbora learn to pilot the second boat.”

“But—”

“We’re going to fly towards the queens and the others,” Stone said. “In case they need help.”

That, Niran wasn’t going to argue with. “Alright.”

To their credit, the Arbora knew how to organize, and fast. Niran brought the ships over the half-destroyed colony so they could be loaded faster, using the opportunity to show Blossom how it worked. She took to it surprisingly quickly for someone who’d never seen a ship before. 

Once it was clear Blossom had things under control and could follow Niran as long as he performed no tricky maneuvers, Stone said, “Keep this heading unless I come back to give you directions. I’ll fly ahead.”

Niran just about had a heart attack when Stone shifted. Sure, he’d seen Stone carried into the blind unconscious in his gigantic shifted shape, but seeing him in motion was much more impressive. 

The waiting wasn’t so bad now that they were in motion, but the going was so smooth that he was left with too much time to think. 

He spoke in the general direction of several Arbora. “You said you were moving back to your old colony in the Reaches, correct? What if it isn’t there anymore?”

Flower stirred. “Stone said it was fine the last time he went. It’s not so far, for him.”

“And this is a nice place? Warm and dry?” The blind had been well done, but he didn’t really want Moon living like that permanently. As for the pyramid, he’d only seen it destroyed. 

“I would hope so,” Flower said drily. “We wouldn’t put our clutches somewhere uncomfortable or unpleasant.” Then, as if reading his mind, she said, “A blind is fine for emergencies, but we much prefer to be inside a structure, with warm pools to bath, spelled rocks for heat and light, and many blankets and cushions.”

That sounded acceptable, so Niran moved on to his next question. “Tell me about consorts and queens. Jade is still interested in Moon, isn’t she? How would it go, if Moon was from a proper court?”

Raksura etiquette, it turned out, was really complicated. And involved a whole lot of tea. As long as nobody asked Moon to pour tea ‘in a graceful manner’ to impress Jade…

“Is Moon interested, do you think?” Flower asked after her lengthy explanation. 

“Is Jade actually interested, or just desperate?” Niran shot back. “Will she look elsewhere as soon as she gets the chance?”

Flower shook her head. “Jade is young, but not irresponsible. Even if they end up preferring to sleep with warriors or Arbora more than each other, Jade will stand by her choice of consort. She might eventually take a second consort to diversify our bloodlines, but Moon would have a say in that, and possibly pick the consort himself.”

Niran didn’t really want to get into the details of the Raksura’s sexual mores, but at least it seemed like Chime was allowed to crush on Moon, and vice-versa, with no issue. So he answered Flower’s question. 

“Moon doesn’t blink when something tries to eat him, but he panics every time Jade looks at him. He’s definitively interested.” And probably terrified of being rejected or found unsuitable, but that wasn’t anything Niran could fix.

*

Niran was not happy to see Moon being carried onboard looking half dead.

“What did you do to him?” he asked Jade accusingly while leading the way to a cabin. 

“A Fell broke his wing and made him shift back,” Jade said. “That means—”

“—he’s in bad shape,” Niran finished. “Yeah, I know. It’s happened before.” Just the once, but it had been awful.

There wasn’t much to do except settle Moon comfortably and make sure somebody was with him at all times, to offer food and water whenever he surfaced. Niran figured he could trust the Raksura to do that much, although he made a pointed comment about it anyway. The guilty looks told him they’d follow through.

*

Niran didn’t mind stopping the ship on request—something about a court meeting—but he didn’t much like being out of the loop of what was going on, especially when things got loud.

“What’s all that yelling?” Niran asked the warriors on the roof. The warriors viewed him with suspicion but they usually answered his questions. Niran had the vague feeling it would have been an insult to Moon if they hadn’t.

“The queens are fighting over Moon on the other boat,” one of the warrior said. 

Niran frowned. He’d understood the reigning queen was Jade’s mother. “What, Pearl doesn’t approve of Jade’s interest in Moon?”

“Um.” The warrior looked distinctly uncomfortable suddenly. “It looks like Pearl wants him, too.”

Niran was momentarily speechless. Then indignation rose. “She’s too old for him! And she barely knows him! And Moon doesn’t like her!” Well, he didn’t know that, but Moon was clearly taken with Jade, who was a fairly sensible young lady of Moon’s age, so that was alright, but if they thought they could force Moon to wed—mate with, whatever—that other queen… “You go tell them there’s no way in hell they get to decide what happens to Moon; they nearly let him die! Grandfather will not approve of this!”

In the absence of a proper queen, it was Grandfather’s opinion—as Moon’s stand-in sire—that Raksura would respect most. Niran’s opinion, apparently, was nearly worthless, because he was just a male clutchmate, not a female one, and he didn’t have a ‘queen’ to give him status. Maybe he should have asked Diar to stay.

One of the warriors flew off and returned with Flower. “Nobody would force a consort,” she said at once. “Queens may fight over who gets to court a consort first, but they can’t make the consort accept their suit and certainly not without, ah, family approval. Besides,” she said with a frustrated sigh, “they wouldn’t work well together. Pearl’s head is turned by the fact Moon is a young, beautiful consort, but he’s too strong-willed to be her type. The queens will work their disagreement out, and then Jade will court Moon properly, and if he says yes, she will send a letter to his sire.”

Niran subsided. “Fine. I’m going to see Moon. Everybody yell if there’s a problem.” He went, after a quick check to ensure the way was clear and they wouldn’t drift into anything he if stepped away. 

Moon, it turned out, was covered in tiny Raksura. Niran glared at them. “What are they doing here? Moon needs rest.”

One of the small ones, who looked like a queen as far as Niran could tell, grabbed onto Moon and hissed. “We’re Moon’s clutch!”

Niran stared. “Uh, what?” 

“Not literally,” Moon said drily. “I just found them. They’re the only survivors of another court the Fell got to.”

Niran winced and didn’t say “like you, then.” They still didn’t know what had happened to Moon’s birth court, but… Now that they’d seen what Fell could do to a Raksura court, it seemed awfully likely.

“Who is that?” the small terror wanted to know.

“That’s my clutchmate Niran,” Moon said patiently. “He’s a groundling, but he’s still my clutchmate. Be polite.”

“Oh. Hello, I’m Frost.”

Stone, who had been sitting in the corner, rose with the other two kids in his arms. “Come on, Frost. Moon needs to rest.”

As soon as they were alone, Niran said, “I’m told the queens are fighting over who gets to court you.”

“I know, Stone explained.” 

“You don’t seem upset about it.”

Moon looked away. “I’m just glad they’re not trying to exile me.”

“Uh, why?” Niran sat on the edge of the bed very carefully. “What did you do?”

“The Fell said… They targeted Indigo Cloud because their mentor-dakti crossbreed could see I would come there. They attacked the colony as soon as they saw me at the temple meeting. They wanted me for breeding.”

Niran absorbed that in appalled silence. Eventually he offered, “I suppose Pearl doesn’t look too bad compared to that. I like Jade better, though.”

“Me too.” Moon cocked his head. “It’s gotten quiet. Maybe they’ve finished?” 

On cue, Jade swept in. 

“So, who won the fight over me?” Moon asked. 

“We weren’t really fighting about you,” Jade said, shaking her head. “I already have Delin’s blessing and Pearl doesn’t. She’d almost rather mate with Fell than go begging for permission to court a consort.”

Niran crossed his arms. “You have Delin’s what now?”

Jade looked briefly self-conscious. “Delin said I didn’t need his permission, only Moon’s consent. But he said I could have his blessing in the endeavor. Diar said sensibly the same. Do you disapprove?”

“Not really,” Niran said grudgingly. “But Moon doesn’t get to say yes until we see your new colony. No offense, but right now your court is homeless. I’m not letting my, um, clutchmate be homeless.”

“That’s a reasonable concern,” Jade said. 

“Niran, get out already!” Moon said, clearly aggravated. “You’re being embarrassing.”

“Only if you leave the door open. Flower says that proper unattached consorts aren’t left alone with unrelated queens.”

“Look at you trying to be a Raksura. At this rate you’ll be better at it than me. Maybe Jade should be courting you, huh?”

Niran didn’t slap Moon in the head because that would just prove his point. Maybe Raksura habits were catching. Instead he said, “Then you’d just be jealous.” He evaded the pillow Moon threw at him and retreated.


	7. Chapter 7

NIRAN

The trip to the old colony was surprisingly restful. Well, the Raksura complained the entire time because they were bored, but Niran enjoyed not being under threat of being eaten and seeing new country. He mapped their progress carefully on a blank new parchment.

The Arbora had told him queens courted consorts with gifts so he wasn’t surprised to find himself stumbling over some new trinket left by the door of the cabin nearly every morning. There’d been a luxurious blanket, and a lovely knife with a carved handle, and even some freshwater fish Jade contrived to procure for the bed-bound object of her affections. 

Moon spent an awful lot of time studying his gifts—not the fish, he’d just eaten that right away—and Niran mostly kept his mouth shut and let Moon work out his feelings. 

Niran would have told Balm she shouldn’t have worried, except she never seemed to be around. There was maybe a problem there, but he figured it would work itself out when Moon and Jade fell in together. The match felt rather inevitable at this point. 

Their arrival at the old colony right as a storm bore down on them was a little more excitement than Niran would have liked, but the place was admittedly impressive. He’d never seen a tree this large. Not that he had time to gawk just then. 

“Hurry!” he shouted at the Arbora carting crates off the ship’s deck and into the colony. “Storm’s about to break on us, go!” 

Moon leapt aboard. “Come on,” he yelled. “Let’s get inside!”

“I’d rather stay with the ship!” Niran yelled back. 

“So something can eat you? What if the predators here are as big as the trees?”

Niran’s further protests were ignored and he was bodily carried inside. He would have minded more if it didn’t immediately feel better to be inside, out of the terrible whipping winds. 

“This tree is fancier than most palaces I’ve seen,” Niran said, as they passed a mural with a fortune’s worth of gems installed into it. They were taking the stairs because Niran wasn’t about to throw himself down the central well. 

“I hope it meets with your approval,” Moon said snippily. “Since you were so concerned about me being homeless.”

“Would you like living here?” 

Moon stopped, suddenly serious. “I wouldn’t hate it.”

“That’s all right then.”

“You’re not angry?”

“About what?”

“That I might choose them over you.”

It felt appropriate, so Niran went ahead and gave Moon a Raksura head slap. “What kind of idiot question is that? We’re still your family, whether you like it or not. You’re just getting more family members. They’re your people and they seem to fit you well enough. You’re all idiots.”

They moved on in silence. 

The bed here was like a giant wooden bowl hanging from the ceiling. Niran looked at it and said, “Okay, I’m going to sleep by the hearth. If I need to pee in the middle of the night I’ll break my neck trying to get out of there.”

“You do that," Moon said. "I’ll get Chime to keep me warm.”

Niran watched Moon pile blankets in the hanging bed before they wandered out of the bower and down to the little common area with a hearth. Someone had put magicked heating stones in it, so sleeping on the floor here wouldn’t be too much of a hardship. 

“I’m going to sleep here,” Niran told the Arbora who were going in and out of nearby bowers, preparing beds. “Moon put Jade’s blankets in that room.”

Everybody kind of stared at them, especially Jade.

“What?” Niran demanded, staring right back.

“When a consort makes a queen’s bed it usually means he wants to sleep with her,” Song said helpfully. 

“That’s enough,” Jade said sharply. “They didn’t know and it means nothing.”

Moon gave Niran a side look. Niran just waved a hand. “I’m not going to say anything.” He knew he could have made Moon change his mind simply by playing on his guilt complex—Without you we shall surely all be eaten on our next expedition, woe!—but it wouldn’t have been fair or right. 

The full force of Jade’s attention settled on Niran. “You approve?”

Moon elbowed Niran, glowering at everybody else. “Would you stop all doing that! His opinion doesn’t count!”

“Grandfather’s opinion counts to them, though,” Niran countered. “But he’d love this place and he already likes Jade. So.”

“So,” Moon echoed, looking away. “Yeah.”

Everybody pretended not to notice when Jade and Moon went to the bower, just the two of them. Niran was almost surprised the rest of them didn’t want to go watch. Raksura didn’t do privacy much. 

Thankfully Niran was so tired he slept like the dead and didn’t have to handle hearing things he really didn’t want to. 

The next morning was a little unpleasant. Roughly the entire colony dropped by with essentially the same question. _“Is it true? Is Moon staying?”_

Niran grumpily told them all to ask Moon. But when Moon did appear, everybody retreated and left them alone at the hearth. 

Moon was wearing a brand new bracelet. “New gift, huh?” Niran said. 

Moon fiddled with it. “Consort bracelet, apparently.”

Niran leaned forward and sniffed.

“What are you doing?” Moon asked, bewildered.

“The Arbora said that when a queen takes a consort she puts a scent marker on him so other queens are warned he’s taken. You don’t smell better than usual though. Did she not do it?”

Moon looked away. “She asked, anyway. I said yes.”

“I figured that’d happen.” The Arbora had been pretty clear that it would be a terrible insult for a queen to sleep with a consort without officially taking him, at least under normal circumstances. Moon might have chosen to accept the sex and put off the bigger decision, but Niran wasn’t surprised he’d gone all in. 

“Do you think Delin will be hurt if I don’t go back with you…?”

“He basically told Jade to court you, remember? But you’ll have to write him a letter before I go. Try to list a couple items Raksura might like to trade. Grandfather’s going to demand we come visit you, I can tell, and I’m not travelling all the way back here without some sort of compensation.”

Moon sagged in obvious relief. “Thank you.”

“If you can’t wait, you know how to get home.”

“Yeah.” Just to be contrary, Moon pointed in the right direction. 

Niran had always been deeply skeptical of Moon's claim that he always knew where south was, but he just rolled his eyes and leaned his shoulder against Moon’s. “I’m told Raksura have five babies at a time. Grandfather is going to be really excited about that.”


	8. Chapter 8

Epilogue  
(set during The Siren Depths)

Sometimes, things went from good to catastrophic too fast to follow.

Seated with Jade and Pearl across from Tempest of Emerald Twilight, Zephyr of Sunset Water, and an unnamed consort, Moon could barely comprehend what was going on.

“When you visited Emerald Twilight,” Zephyr explained, “the reigning queen Ice believed she recognized your bloodline. She sent a message to Opal Night, asking about it. She wasn’t expecting them to demand to have you back.”

“Tell them to piss off,” Moon said. 

“If you’d clutched,” Pearl said drily, “we could tell them to piss off.”

“What if I just don’t go?”

“They might come here and start a war,” Tempest said. “They’re a powerful court with many queens and warriors and they can afford to lose several.”

It was implied that Indigo Cloud could not afford the same. Nobody said anything while Moon contemplated this terrible possibility.

“I don’t care about bloodlines,” Moon finally said, fighting to hold onto his temper. “I already have a family. If they won’t let me stay here without threatening Indigo Cloud, I’ll go back to the Golden Isles. I won’t go to a different court. Tell them that’s their choice. Me here in an actual Raksura court, or me going back to my groundling family and their wandering ways.”

“But,” Tempest said, “I’m here to conduct you to Opal Night.”

Moon rose, shifted, and flared all his spines. “Make me,” he growled.

Tempest stared at him. “You wouldn’t fight a queen.”

“He would try,” Pearl said. Moon noted she didn’t even try to make him shift back, probably because she didn’t want the foreign queens to realize she couldn’t. She’d tried before. 

“Moon,” Jade said urgently. “Opal Night is just flexing their power. I just have to go to there and beg for you, that’s all.”

“You can go there if you like,” Moon said without looking at Jade. “I’m not going. They have no right to me. I mean it; if I can’t stay here, I’m packing and going home. I can leave tomorrow morning and Tempest can tell them she saw me go.”

Tempest looked even more alarmed. “They won’t believe me. They’ll accuse me of lying!”

Moon couldn’t muster a shred of sympathy for Tempest. “Your court started this mess, your court can finish it.”

Jade, too, was looking alarmed. She moved to lay a hand on his wrist. “You can’t go; we need you!”

“No you don’t,” Moon shot back, shaking her off. “That consort’s here to replace me, isn’t he?”

“No, I—”

Moon snarled at her and bounded away. He didn’t want excuses or justifications. The situation was quite clear to him. Raksura valued consorts for breeding. Since he hadn’t been able to give Jade a clutch after months of trying, nobody would want him in the end. Except his groundlings. So he might as well go back right away and spare himself further humiliation. 

He went up to his bower and started packing. Looking over his collection of fledgling gifts, he picked up a rag doll Thorn had made for him. Did he have time to visit them or should he leave immediately?

He didn’t think it was feasible for Tempest to actually cart him off against his will; he’d have too many opportunities to flee and she’d have to hurt him to stop him, which she wouldn’t risk if Opal Night was that possessive. But she might try to cart him off anyway and he would rather not have to kill anyone.

But it would be cruel to leave the clutch without a goodbye. Moon stared down at the doll, his heart squeezing painfully. 

Chime rushed in the bower. “Moon, are you okay? Jade says you threatened to leave!” Chime stopped and stared at the pack in Moon’s hand in obvious distress. “You can’t! Queens take second consorts all the time! It doesn’t mean Jade doesn’t want you!”

“He’s not here to be a second consort. He’s my replacement.” 

“What? No. You must have misunderstood.”

Moon’s snarl silenced Chime. “Tempest wants to take me away and Jade and Pearl can’t argue without risking war with a much bigger court. Go ask them about it.” He put his pack aside. “I’m going down to say goodbye to the clutches.”

It was the hardest goodbye he’d ever had to make. Saying goodbye to Niran had been hard, but he was an adult and perfectly capable of visiting. These fledglings, however, would not be coming to visit him, not even after they grew up. He wouldn’t want them to make such a long journey, anyway. 

When Moon got back to the consort level, still debating leaving now versus enjoying a last night of comfort, Chime had brought reinforcements. Tea was brewing and several people sat around the hearth, including Song and Vine. 

“You can’t leave,” Chime said quietly. “Or an Opal Night queen might show up, demand to see you, and when we can’t produce you, challenge Jade to a fight.”

Moon crossed his arms to hide his flinch of guilt. “They can’t make me go.”

“The queens noticed,” Chime added, more than a little drily. “When I left they were talking about writing a joint letter to Opal Night explaining you threatened to attack Tempest. They’ll suggest it’s because you’re in a panic and think this is all a trick to steal you. Tempest will just have to let her dignity be hurt if they demand she submit to a mentor truth test. Opal Night will have to send people to talk to you here instead.”

Well, Moon supposed that was close enough to the truth. Raksura were more likely to believe a consort would freak out at a foreign queen than decide to up and leave the Reaches. 

“I won’t go anywhere with them either,” he warned.

Chime gave him a look. “They’ll believe it more when you say so to their faces.”

Things were quiet for a number of days. There was endless speculation about whether Opal Night would give up or pursue this, and if so, who would show up. Ember had been given a bower on the consort level but Moon studiously avoided him. He avoided Jade too because he didn’t want to talk about Ember. 

Moon mostly spent these days in the nurseries and in the company of small Raksura whose primary concerns were eating, sleeping, and playing. They were far more restful than grownup Raksura. 

So he was rather blindsided when Chime bounded in his bower and said in triumph, “Pearl took Ember as consort!”

“What? What about Jade?” Moon found himself angry on her behalf. He’d already half-talked himself into accepting that Jade needed a second consort since he hadn’t been able to give her a clutch. 

Jade pulled Chime out of the way so she could step in. “Jade would like an apology from her one and only consort,” she said pointedly. “I realized right away that Ember was Pearl’s type and I would have told you so if you’d let me.”

“Oh. I thought maybe you wanted a clutch from him instead.”

“I don’t,” Jade said, and jumped him.

*

Moon was a little less stressed after that. A little. He was holding out hope that Stone might return from the Golden Islands before they got any new visitors. Now that Ember was settled—and apparently happy about it—Moon was trying hard to think of a way to make himself unappealing to Opal Night. Raksura didn’t like troublesome consorts, so he’d be trouble. He was good at it. 

Moon had made it very, very clear that he was to be told of arriving visitors before Jade and Pearl. His argument, which seemed to sway most everybody, was that a fight might break out if he didn’t appear first. A fight might still break out anyway, but if were there he could at least throw himself in the middle and baffle the foreign queen into backing down. It had worked with Tempest.

He had never before spent so much time dressed up and sitting around, ready to leap into action at any moment. He wanted to appear clean and pampered and very, very hostile. 

So when Song burst in suddenly, Moon started moving even before she gasped, “A huge queen is here! Serene is trying to greet her!”

Chime and Vine followed hot on his heels, Song with a delay to catch her breath. 

Other warriors fell in behind him, so that he had a sizeable escort by the time he landed besides Serene in front of a pair of queens, one roughly his age, the other far older and bigger. The thought of that one challenging Jade… No. 

The foreign queens didn’t have any warriors with them, which was a bad sign. It probably meant they’d flown here so fast that warriors couldn’t have kept up. That was not the behavior of people willing to be reasonable, so he was going to be unreasonable first. 

“This is Moon, first consort of Indigo Cloud and consort to our sister-queen Jade,” Serene said. “Moon, these are Malachite and Celadon, reigning queen and daughter queen of Opal Night. They say they’re related to you.”

Moon gave them his best murder glare. “What do you want?”

The large queen whipped away suddenly, leaping off the platform. 

Moon spun to watch the large queen—Malachite—but she’d only gone to perch further away. “What’s with her?” 

“You really don’t remember us?” Celadon said. “I’m your clutchmate and she’s our mother. I remember you a little.”

Moon’s hostility died. That…hadn’t been part of the plan. He eventually came up with, “Do we have other clutchmates?” If he had three more out there, he might as well find out now. 

“They didn’t survive the Fell,” Celadon said. “Neither did our father.”

It was always the Fell, Moon thought distantly. He had a blood sibling and…a mother. 

Everybody jumped when Jade landed. “Moon, what are you doing?” she hissed, moving quickly to cover him. She was struggling not to let her spines rise, to avoid giving an excuse for a challenge. 

Moon transferred his stare to Jade. “She says she’s my clutchmate.”

Jade’s spines flattened at once. She studied Celadon and Moon a moment. “I see it.”

Moon waved vaguely at the large queen, who had decide to rejoin them. “That’s Malachite, apparently my mother.”

“You,” Malachite said as she landed, advancing on Jade. “You’re the one who took him.”

“With his adoptive sire’s permission,” Jade countered, holding her ground. 

“You mean a groundling,” Malachite said, like she didn’t think much of the idea.

Moon let his spines flare out and his voice drop to a growl. “That groundling saved me after you left me to die. He raised me and protected me. You don’t get to say a word against him.”

Malachite studied him in silence for so long that Moon’s anger began to turn into bafflement. Had she come here just to look at him?

The several warriors on the platform with them appeared to be trying not to exist. Moon glanced around, uneasy under Malachite’s unwavering attention, and realized Pearl was out too, standing one platform over and apparently letting them handle this. Now that was unnerving. 

“We would really like it if you came to Opal Night to meet all your relatives,” Celadon said, breaking the silence. “Will you come?”

Moon snorted. “So you can keep me there? No.”

“Please, we can’t stay long. We think a Fell flight plans to attack a groundling city just outside the Reaches and I haven’t been able to convince them of the danger yet. They’ve never heard of Fell.”

“A Fell flight might be about to attack near your colony and you left to come here?” Moon asked, incredulous.

“Malachite was worried about you. The letter sounded dire.”

“As you can see, I’m fine. Feel free to go back to defend your court instead of bothering us.”

There were still a number of warriors trying to patrol as if everything was normal, as evidenced by the fact one of them hastily landed and whispered to Jade, “Stone’s back!”

The warrior shouldn’t have bothered, because Stone came into view moments later, followed by a wind ship. It wasn’t either of the ships they’d sent back, but another one Delin favored for smaller trips. 

“What’s that?” Celadon asked, baffled.

“Looks like my groundling sire is visiting me in my new court,” Moon said pointedly. “I better go greet him. Jade?”

Jade was just as happy as he was to seize this opportunity to get away. “Yes, of course. If you’ll excuse us…”

They flew down. Delin was on deck, waving, and he immediately enfolded Moon in a hug.   
Diar was there too, and Niran, who made some prickly comment about not even getting to take a bath before he had to leave again.

“You could have stayed home, you just left here!” Moon told Niran. But he was pleased nonetheless. 

Stone, who’d meanwhile landed and shifted, started asking, “Who’s that queen?”

Because of course Malachite had followed. Moon swallowed a sigh as she landed. “This is Malachite, reigning queen of Opal Night. She says she’s my mother.”

*

It was probably Niran’s fault that cushions were put down on deck and tea offered in a suspiciously fancy, brand new tea set. The Raksura obsession with tea hadn’t been in any of Delin’s books or scrolls. 

Moon then spent an excruciatingly long time sitting at Delin’s side, wincing at every childhood incident Delin saw fit to recount. There were a lot. At least the embarrassment kept him from dwelling on how freaked out he was to suddenly have a living mother. 

“—and there was that time Moon, Niran, and Diar spent an evening telling each other such gruesome horror stories that when a storm started whipping the windows overnight they all three ended up begging to sleep in my bed. I believe they tried it with my daughter first but she firmly sent them back to their own beds. For my soft-heartedness, I got kicked in the head at least twice that night.”

Moon couldn’t begin to guess whether Delin was using these stories as a weapon against Malachite, to emphasis which of them had been watching over Moon, or as a way to win Malachite over. 

Whichever it was, it didn’t seem to be working, anyway. Malachite listened, but she was still as a statue, showing no special interest. 

“There was also the time with the fish—”

Moon groaned. “Not that one! I was small and I didn’t know any better!”

Delin patted his knee. “You meant well, which is why it’s a treasured memory I enjoy telling. Your mother will like it.” He cheerfully continued his offensive. 

Malachite eventually stirred to say, “You care for him as one of your own.”

“Of course,” Delin replied. “He is the child of my heart, if not my blood. Do you have no one like that in your court?” 

The weight of Malachite’s attention increased, as if Delin had somehow marked a point. Several people on deck shifted uneasily, but Delin only smiled serenely. 

“And you approve of this young queen?” Malachite probed. 

“Jade and Moon have been taken with each other since they met and she’s proven herself brave and capable. I have no objections so long as he’s happy.”

Moon was beginning to realize that Delin, with his leadership, evident good will, and pure white hair, came across to Raksura as something akin to an elderly Arbora leader. Even absurdly large Raksura queens instinctively granted him a level of courtesy he could use to his advantage. It explained why Malachite has sat there listening to baby Moon’s exploits instead of trying to start a fight with Jade. 

“Tell me about the Fell,” Delin suddenly said. “Your daughter mentioned something about a vulnerable groundling city?”

Delin wasn’t psychic; Jade, Celadon, and Diar, along with several warriors, had been whispering nearby, close enough to listen but far enough to pretend they weren’t involved. Delin must have heard a little of what they spoke about, enough to ask about it. 

“Celadon,” Malachite said.

Celadon came over and sat. “The city is called Aventera. There’s a Fell flight in the area but my efforts to get the groundling to prepare for an attack have been useless. They look at us with suspicion and won’t believe a word we say.”

Delin stroked his white beard thoughtfully. “It’s quite worrying for Fell to come so close to the Reaches, isn’t it?”

“We’re afraid they might use the city as a way-point before trying to attack us,” Celadon admitted. “We can fight them, but it won’t be pleasant.”

“Fighting never is,” Delin said absently. “Perhaps I could help. These people may not be as suspicious of me as they are of you. I could try to persuade them, if there is still time. Then perhaps we could visit your court together, so Moon might meet his other relatives without being distressed at leaving his court and queen behind.”

“It wouldn’t hurt to get a look at those Fell,” Stone said, wandering closer. He’d been sitting further away, looking generally cranky about the entire situation, but his superior hearing probably let him follow every conversation on deck. “The last thing we need is to let Fell think they can make incursions near the Reaches and survive.”

Jade seemed unhappy, but only looked to Moon to see if he had objections. He answered her with a half shrug. He did want to go, a little bit. As long as Jade came too. 

Malachite looked like she had an inkling she was being manipulated by a groundling and a line-grandfather. She still agreed. 

Moon sighed. He’d been happy with just his groundling family, but now his family kept expanding whether he liked it or not. Celadon seemed sensible enough, but his mother was a baffling mystery. 

Moon went to Stone to relay his Delin-as-elderly-Arbora theory. He received a rather insulting disbelieving look.

“You think she sat through all those stories out of obligation?” Stone said. “I don’t like her, but she’s your birth queen; of course she wanted to hear about your fledglinghood.”

“You saw her! She sat there like a rock.”

“That’s probably how she conveys enjoyment. Must be a family thing, since you always look like you want to kill something.”

Moon drew back in affront. “Well, your only mood is crankiness!”

“I’m old. I can be as cranky as I like.” Stone’s attention went elsewhere, as if something was happening, so Moon turned to look; Balm was stepping up to Malachite and Celadon with a nervous air.

“Will you come inside and be officially greeted by our reigning queen?” Balm asked, speaking in Raksura instead of the trade language everybody had been using for the Golden Islanders’ benefit. 

Celadon looked to Malachite, who merely said, “We’ll be fine outside. With Moon,” she added heavily. 

Stone grunted. “Stubborn queen. You sure you want to visit their court if she keeps refusing Jade?” 

“Wait,” Moon said, “Delin’s up to something.”

“Yes, the queens will be fine with us,” Delin said. “In any case, Moon meant to spend the night here, so they will be able to spend time together. I believe I have drawings of Moon as a child. Perhaps the queens will enjoy seeing them.”

Everybody looked at Delin sideways because he’d spoken the Raksura tongue. His accent was atrocious, but understandable. Clearly he’d spent the trip learning from the Arbora.

Celadon looked to Malachite and then, apparently not seeing an objection, said, “I would like that.”

Stone grunted again, but this one was of the impressed kind. “Your groundling is devious.”

Moon tried to work it out. “Because he claimed them as guests and bribed them to agree? As if this ship were his colony and they’d already accepted his hospitality by having tea and a conversation with him?”

“Yes, that. I suppose your birth queen is more willing to recognize Delin’s claim as your sire than Jade’s as your queen.”

Moon huffed out a breath. “Well, my birth queen is going to have to get over that.” He wasn’t entirely against gaining more family, but he was definitively against losing any. Malachite would just have to deal with it, whether she liked it or not.

-The end-

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The rest would proceed very closely to the original plot so here's where I stop. Thanks for reading!


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